Calculating Email Reports

When you use our Reports module to create email reports, you can pick a series of different KPIs like sent, delivered, opened, and clicked. 

This article covers:

• Email KPIs
  • Report Type Differences
• Apple’s privacy update impact on the Reports module
• Differences Between your Reports and Agillic Reports
  • Email is Sent Outside Reporting Period
  • Emails are Clicked But Never Opened

Email KPIs

If you want to recreate these KPIs in an external system like a BI system, based on an Activity Export, you can use the following description to help you set up the calculations.

Note that the communication statuses COMPLAINT and COMPLAINT_WITHDRAWN are only registered for email clients using the standard Abuse Reporting Format (ARF).

Note: 'Total Clicks' is not referred to as physical clicks but referred to as the number of events that get activated when a recipient clicks on e.g. a link or a button. This means that if you have two events attached to a link or a button and a recipient click once this will be registered as two total clicks.

Apple’s privacy update impact on the Reports module  

In autumn 2021 Apple will introduce changes to the Mail application to increase users’ control over their privacy. You can read more about what is being updated and what it means here.  

The update will impact the Reports module as emails will register as opened in Agillic regardless of whether the recipient opens them or not, as emails will be marked as read as soon as the inbox is loaded. Open rates will therefore increase, opposite will click rates decrease. Total and Unique clicks will stay the same. 

Report Type Differences

Be mindful that Agillic calculates some report types differently:

• Table Report type: Only includes activity on the sent emails for the chosen time period.
• All other Report types: Includes all activity for the chosen time period, regardless of the delivery time of the email.

Differences Between your Reports and Agillic Reports

If you set up the calculations from the previous table, in some cases, you may still see minor differences in open and click-rates. These differences are usually due to one of the following cases:

Email is Sent Outside Reporting Period

When reporting on one or more emails, a reporting period is set. You may define this with a date-picker or simply with whatever data is in a specific Activity Export.

Because of this way of filtering, you may experience that certain emails are also sent before the reporting period, but some recipients are opening and clicking on the email within the reporting period.

Agillic filters out this data in the Reports module to avoid artificially high open or click-rates.
To prevent the same issues in your external reports, we recommend you look up any opens or clicks and link to the delivery of the same email to the same recipient within the reporting period.

Emails are Clicked But Never Opened

Since Agillic counts an open as loading the images in an email, it's technically possible to click an email without opening it. In this case, the Activity Export shows a timestamp for the click but no entry for an open. This is because Agillic can confirm the email was opened, but can't give a specific timestamp.

In Reports, the open data is automatically added for these clicks to ensure a click-rate can never be above 100%. To prevent the same issues in your external reports, we recommend you look up any clicks which don't also have an open and add an artificial open to ensure the open and that the click rate shows the correct result.

In order to correctly compare the unique opens from the reporter module with the activity export data the following formula can be used:

unique opens (reporter) = DISTINCT occurrence of (Recipient ID) {
unique READ_ACK (Communication Status) + unique EVENT (Communication Status)
}

Suggested Next Steps

• Understanding Reports
• Understanding Email Bounces
• All You Need to Know About Data Models